James Viscardi
Gallery Affiliations: Last Resort Gallery, The Sunday Painter
Region: Northeast
I am preoccupied with wandering and tales of vagabonds. The
subtle, steady movement of feet on the ground marching to
the edge of what is known. I am a gold digger, a prankster, a
role player, and a damn fool. Everything I have to give is here
with me, from my bag of tricks to the shirt off my back. I am
working toward bringing movement and passage into the static
stillness of painting. I am creating my own abstracted visual
language and tools by studying the visual storytelling methods
of various cultures, particularly the highly refined methods
of Japanese woodblock printmaking, ancient Inca embroidery,
and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval Europe and the
Middle East. I’ve mined fragments of gold from the detritus
of history, grinding them into a fine dust and baking them
into building blocks that I can use in my studio. They make
Frankenstein amalgamations full of ragged scars and gaps in
meaning. Where meaning slips into abstraction, viewers are free
to enter and draw their own conclusions.